“So you just assumed me to be ignorant.” [the servant James, who is a central consciousness in the book & reads serious history].
No, but — “[Sarah, our main heroine]
“But it never occurred to you that I might read more widely than, say you, for example?
“I read all the time! Don’t I, Mrs Hill?
“The housekeeper nodded sagely.
“MrB allows me books, and his newspapers, and Miss Elizabeth always gives me whatever novel she has borrowed from the circulating library.”
“Of course, yes. Miss Elizabeth’s novels. I’m sure they are very nice.”
“She set her jaw, her eyes narrowed. Then she turned to Mrs Hill.
“They have a black man at Netherfield, did you know? she announced triumphnty. “I was talking to him yesterday.”
James paused in his work, then tilted his head, and got on with his polishing.
“Well,” said Mrs Hill, “I expect Mrs Nicholls needs all the help that she can get.” (Longbourn, p 49)
Our family affairs are rather deranged at present, for Nanny has kept her bed these three or four days with a pain on her side and fever, and we are forced to have two charwomen which is not very comfortable. She is considerably better now, but it must be some time, I suppose, before she is able to do anything. You and Edward will be surprised when you know that Nanny Littlewart dresses my hair ….
Anna has not a chance of escape; her husband called here the other day, & said she was pretty well but not equal to “so long a walk; she must come in her “Donkey Carriage.”–Poor Animal, she will be worn out before she is thirty.—I am very sorry for her.–Mrs Clement too is in that way again. I am quite tired of so many Children.–Mrs Benn has a 13th… (Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. Le Faye 22, 336, Letters dated Sunday 25 November 1798; Sunday 23- Tuesday 25 March 1817)
Dear friends,
Another unusual kind of blog for me: I’m pointing out three other very good postings on three other blogs. The content or emphases in two of them are linked: these bring before us the direct underworld of Austen’s experience: the lives of servants all around her and her characters. The first by Rohen Maitzen, is valuable as an unusually long and serious review of an Austen sequel or post-text. Maitzen suggests that Longbourn is so much better than most sequels because Baker builds up her own imaginative world alongside Austen’s. It’s another way of expressing one of my central arguments in my blog on the novel. I also partly attributed the strength of the book to Baker’s developing these marginal (or outside the action) characters within Austen. Longbourn reminded me of Valerie Martin’s Mary Reilly or Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead : they too focus most of the action and intense subjectivities from within the marginalized characters. I thought Baker also used elements from the Austen film adaptations, and particularly owed a lot to Andrew Davies’ 1995 P&P; I wondered if she got the idea from the use made of the real house both in the film and companion book:
And this allegiance suggests why Longbourn does not rise above its status or type as a sequel, not a book quite in its own right: Baker’s research stays within the parameters of Austen’s own Pride and Prejudice except when she sends the mysterious footman (Mr Bennet’s illegitimate son by Mrs Hill) to the peninsular war. Had she developed this sequence much further, researched what happened in Portugal and Spain, Longbourn might have been a historical novel in its own right the way Mary Reilly and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea is.
While I’m at it, here’s a good if short review from The Guardian‘s Hannah Rosefield of Longbourn. Baker has written another post-text kind of novel, A Country Road, A Tree: a biography of Samuel Beckett for the period leading up to and perhaps inspiring Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.
And a note on The Jane Austen Book Club by Joy Fowler, film adaptation Robin Swicord, and link to an older blog-review.
Sylvia, our part Fanny Price, part Anne Elliot character reading for February
Jean Chardin’s Washerwoman and a Cat
Vic Sanbourn has written an excellent thorough blog called Unseen and Unnoticed Servants in the background of Jane Austen’s Novels & Life. Of course dedicated readers of Austen are aware of the not infrequent and sudden referrals in the texts to a servant right there all the time, ready to take a character’s horse away, there in the room to pick something up, to fetch someone, as someone one of Austen’s vivid characters refers to and may even quote; if you read her letters, especially those later in Bath, you find her referring (usually comically) to one of the servants. When it’s a question of discussing when a meal is to be served or some task accomplished a servant is mentioned. In her letters we hear of Mr Austen’s worry about a specific servant (real person)’s fate once the family leaves Steventon; Jane borrows a copy of the first volume of Robinson Crusoe for a male servant in Bath. Vic has carefully studied some of these references, and she provides an extensive bibliography for the reader to follow up with. She reprints Hogarth’s famous “Heads of Six Servants.”
I’ll add that some of Austen’s characters come near to being servants: Fanny Price, Jane Fairfax. We see Mrs Price struggling with her one regular servant, Rebecca, trying to get her to do all the hard or messy work, the continual provision of food. Austen was herself also friends with people who went out (as it were) to service. Martha Lloyd worked as a companion. Austen visited Highclere Castle (renamed Downton Abbey for the serial) to have tea with its housekeeper. A young woman we know Austen had a deep congenial relationship with, Anne Sharpe (“She is an excellent kind friend”, was governess for a time at Godmersham.
Elizabeth Poldark Warleggan (Jill Townsend) suffering badly after a early childbirth brought on by a doctor via a contemporary herb mixture she herself wanted, a puzzled Dr Enys (Michael Cadman) by her side (1978 BBC Poldark, Episode 13)
Lastly, while Diana Birchall’s blog on Austen’s mentions of confinement (the last weeks of a woman’s pregnancy, the time of self-withdrawal with people helping you to give birth, the immediate aftermath) is not on marginalized characters, it is itself a subject often marginalized when brought up at all in literary criticism and reviews. It is not a subject directly addressed in the novels, and it is a subject frequently brought up through irony, sarcasm, and sheer weariness and alienated mentions in Austen’s letters. Readers concentrate sometimes with horror over Austen’s raillery and mockery of women in parturition, grown so big that they must keep out of large public groups (by the 9th month), and her alienation from the continual pregnancies and real risks to life (as well as being all messy a lot) imposed on all women once they married. So this is a subject as much in need of treatment as distinguishing what makes a good post-text and servants in the era. From Diana’s blog we become aware that had Austen wanted or dared (she was a maiden lady and was not by mores allowed to write of topics that showed real knowledge of female sexuality) she could have written novels where we experience women giving birth. Diana shows the process also reinforced the social confinement of women of this genteel class in this era.
I gave a paper and put on academia.edu that her caustic way of describing parturition can be aligned with her wildly anti-pathetic way of coping with death and intense suffering: the more pain and risk, the more hilarity she creates — we see this in the mood of Sanditon, written by her when she too is very ill and dying. See my The Depiction of Widows and Widowers in the Austen Canon
It has become so common for recent critics and scholars to find “new approaches” by postulating preposterous ideas (about her supposed Catholic sympathies, her intense religiosity; see my review of Battigelli’s Art and Artefacts; Roger Moore has become quite explicit that in Mansfield Park we have a novel as religious sacred text) partly because there is still a strong inhibition against associating Jane Austen with bodily issues and people living on the edge of gentility dependent on a very few too hard-working servants. So issues right there, as yet untreated fully, staring at us in plain sight go unattended. In Downton Abbey she would not have associated with Lady Mary Crawley, but rather Mrs Hughes. Until recently many readers would not have wanted to know that or not have been able to (or thought to) comprehend that is where fringe genteel people also placed.
Ellen
Reveries Under the Sign of Austen, Two 
See my blog, “Eve’s herbs:” a history of abortion, contraception – and pregnancy too — in Europe. I include information on what concoction Elizabeth Poldark Warleggan took to bring on an early birth and what killed her:
From a knowledgeable friend:
“Re your blog and the Poldark reference to “early childbirth”; “ergot” and “rue” (sometimes “Maiden’s Rue”, recte “Ruta Graveolens”; in French “Herbe à la belle Fille”) in mild doses were used in the past (pre modern medicine) to cure gynaecological problems. In stronger doses they produced abortion. Some of the late mediaeval sources suggest they might also have been effective in clearing up postpartum problems. Note that I am not a doctor, so this is a lay-person’s summary from incidental knowledge obtained over years of background reading.
St Anthony’s Fire, modern name “ergotism, was/is produced by excessive intake of ergot (from contaminated flour), or in some cases overdosage or aftermath of a draught of ergot having been used to produce a spontaneous abortion. St Anthony is the saint to whom one prays for relief from ergotism. Rue has similar gynaecological effects in mild doses, and is abortive in heavier doses. The daughter of Titus died from an overdose of Rue in an attempt to procure an abortion.
I was once shown, by a Catholic priest, a photocopy of a list from a late mediaeval manuscript, a list of saints and the illnesses which prayer to that saint was supposed to cure. I can recollect that on the list was also something to do with “Rue”, but cannot remember the specifics, nor the name of the related saint. However, he was surprised when I explained that behind the causes of St Anthony’s Fire and the Rue related illness might also be side effects from the use of these herbs in producing early trimester abortions and the illnesses resulting from possible overdosage.
Details of dosage of either may be given in Culpeper’s “Complete Herbal”; there is also an earlier French herbal, whose name/author I don’t remember, about a hundred years before Culpeper.”
Ellen, Thank you for referencing my blog post. As always, you’d elevated my discussion. Lately I have been obsessed by the world of Jane Austen and the behaviors, mores, and manners she assumed her readers would know and identify in the few clues she left for future generations. Thank goodness for academics to discover those subtle hints in her novels and letters. I enjoyed reading your post immensely.
I framed it in such a way as to align it with Diana’s on women’s issues (confinement as the angle) and the review of Baker’s Longbourn by Maitzen. For the last several years now, especially (ironically) since Trump we have seen for the first time our US history attempt to tell the full truth about what happened after the Civil War: Reconstruction was an at first successful attempt to reconstruct the US gov’t to allow equal and just rights and therefore power to the formerly enslaved African-Americans — so we had on PBS Henry Gates and Eric Foner (wrote a central source book) on Reconstruction telling the tragic tale of the destruction of Black’s people’s rights and ability to earn a good living and live a life equal to other citizens in the US.
I am teaching different books nowadays and teaching those I used to teach somewhat differently.
Our entertainment is changing. Witness the new Sanditon; the 2nd and 3rd season’s it’s said is a response to the American for more, not the British.
True equality and democracy does not just cover Black Americans, but it covers poorer whites, the working class, and vulnerable woman who had no rights as equal citizens until they achieved the vote and legislation to give hem the equal right to make equal money and gradually be let into schools so as to get decent positions, jobs, and positions of power.
How far can we go? I suggest that a much truer depiction of the Palestinians occurred in this past round of Israeli gov’ts police attack on a mosque and determination to eject Palestinians from their homes in Jerusalem and then the Palestinians trying to protect themselves are slaughtered in big numbers and Gaza again destroyed.
So these blogs of ours are small parts of this good movement. Longbourn is looking at P&P from the hard-working servants’ POV. What do they care if Elizabeth is showing her vigor by walking through mud? all that means is Sarah, our servant heroine has a task of hours of hard work trying to bring back the dress back to cleanliness.
But as we know there is a dangerous push back from white supremacists and the very wealthy to again deprive huge numbers of people of the vote and to give local leaders the ability to throw out legal votes — in these new Florida and other bills (Texas among others). I thank you for thanking me because I didn’t make explicit what is implicitly on my mind in this blog until now.
The latest issue of Eighteenth Century Studies contains Jennifer Germann’s “Other Women Were Present:” Seeing Black Women in Georgian London,” Eighteenth Century Studes, 51:3, 536-53. I cited this essay the other day on 18thWorlds@groups.io — I did suspect it might be filled with verbiage and not name many Black women or provide any statistics.
Well I read the essay and to my way of thinking I was right. There is an enormous amount of verbiage, repetition of the same idea that Black women were erased, and the same ways erased, people not named, or at best seen unnamed in pictures which made them exotic. Far too much space on Dido Elizabeth Davinier (c 1760/1-1804, nee Belle). There is an ample bibliography on serious sources (books, essays, documents) where there are apparently attempts to ferret out information about Black women in Georgian London.
And I was able to count around thirteen Black women whom Germann identified and told the names and parentage of (or a couple of the women named were themselves the mothers of Black younger women Germann was able to identify). These were Elizabeth Sancho (1766-1837); Jane Harry Thresher (c 1758-84); the unnamed model (fl 1761) in The Portrait of Lady Elizabeth Keppel (1761); Elizabeth Rosina Clements (called “Bronze” — the so common substitute nickname), employee of a painter, Joseph Nollekens; Ann and Rebecca Ward and their enslaved mother (unnamed, unidentified but had to have existed) as these two women were daughters of wealthy white planter (perhaps Ann wrote A Woman of Color, the anonymous 1808 epistolary novel); Francis Lee (painted by Francis Cotes (1769), and a Jamaican Creole woman (she had to have existed). Jane Thresher had a mulatto sister named Margaret. Germane leaves out that they had to have had an enslaved Black woman as a mother – I know they did from another article I’ve read (and know she was freed and then herself held slaves). Elizabeth Sancho (wife of Ignatius) had a mother and her name was Anne Osbourne. Finally a portrait of a Black woman attributed to Stephen Slaughter (in Wadsworth Athenaeum).
Unfortunately Germann forgets Phillis Wheatley the poet (1753-84), and her unnamed mother (from whom she was snatched) in Africa.
So that takes us to about 15. Some of what we know about two of these women is they died young from childbirth (Wheatley and Thresher). So they connect to Diana’s blog and my commentary on that.
More on sequels and movies: a note: I watched The Jane Austen Book club with a friend for the first time in a long time. It seems more innocent post-Trump, post-pandemic. Mary Lee her name, appeared to enjoy it mightily She had read the 6 once each, but was able to remember them enough, for she remarked that you would not get anywhere near what you could from the movie unless you’ve at least read them all once or most of them. I said it was a movie that like Austen could take several viewings to get it all.
I’d say the central ones to the movie are Emma, P&P and Persuasion — which are today’s most popular — you can’t miss NA (the gothic stuff), & Mansfield Park is directly quoted and attached to a character; Sense & Sensibility once quite popular has lost ground but clearly there explicitly. There have been many movies of S&S, at one time almost as many as P&P– though Emma is beginning to outstrip S&S, especially when the basic content is stripped from it (like the latest true travesty) and then others (alas) follow suit.
I need to reread the book and rewrite this blog
Also set aside a week to reread a couple of these post-texts — a week in August should do it.